Ride sharing is a useful approach to efficient use of transportation, allowing the movement of people in groups of two or more using a single vehicle. Larger, more congested cities may require longer travel times between destinations and often contain large populations of people that have to commute daily from residential communities outside the city to downtown offices. Many such cities have added high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes intended to encourage ride sharing (aka carpooling). Various ways have been employed to place potential carpoolers in contact with each other; most recently, using Internet websites. This can be useful for planned trips or daily work commutes, but not as useful for single ad hoc trips.
In most large cities and elsewhere, wireless communication devices have become ubiquitous, including in particular wireless mobile devices such as cellular phones and vehicle communication devices. Many of these devices use one or more types of communication channels, including voice and data channels, to enable communication and provide a variety of services over wireless networks. They are useful for personal communication to and from individuals and businesses known to the user, but are currently not as useful for distributed communications and, as such, are not particularly useful for directly communicating with local populations of people for purposes such as ride sharing, traffic alerts, etc.
SMS-enabled wireless mobile devices transmit short text messages between different wireless mobile devices, most commonly mobile phones. SMS messaging has a number of desirable attributes that have made it quite a popular form of communicating, including attributes pertaining to its speed and its privacy. The typical use of SMS messaging requires the sender to address the message individually to each intended recipient, whether that be one or many individuals. Thus, SMS as it is widely used today, is not a useful way of connecting with large numbers of people such as potential ride sharing partners.